Millions of people require care for dysphagia, which often arises due to age, neurologic disease, radiation, or surgery, and can impair the ability to swallow. A subset of these patients have primarily oral or oropharyngeal based dysphagia, which affects up to 40% of patients 65 years or older. Some patients require supplemental feeding via a gastrostomy tube, which is accompanied by medical complications and may decrease quality of life. Much of the treatment for oropharyngeal dysphagia seeks to prevent complications such as aspiration pneumonia or malnutrition.
Current treatments for dysphagia include postural strategies for head or body position, change in food bolus volume or viscosity, tonic muscle contraction techniques such as neuromuscular electro-stimulation, specific swallow maneuvers, surgery, sensorial enhancement strategies, pharmacologic treatments, and gastrostomy tubes.